As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.

And that's when I know it's over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it's the end.

That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.